Participation factor approach for phasor measurement unit placement in power system state estimation

This study focuses on the selection of the most effective location of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in the network for the purpose of state estimation. The reduction in the error of the estimated states, that is, the quality improvement of the estimate, is the objective used to select the most appropriate allocation of PMUs. The concept of participation of various states into the uncertainty of the error is applied to identify the most important states influencing the estimated errors. Unlike other methods, the proposed technique considers all the elements of the state error covariance matrix and therefore addresses the impact of correlations between the errors. The effectiveness of the method has been demonstrated on the standard IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 57-bus system models. The comparison of performance with other existing measurement placement techniques targeting the same objective reflects the effectiveness of the participation factor-based approach.